So are we using Lobo's program or are we using the DCI reporter for pairings and using an alternate method to keep track of points?

The whole idea behind a Swiss tourney is that no one plays another player twice during the Swiss portion.

IMO we should use DCI reporter for auto-generated pairings and then keep track of 3/2 on a seperate sheet of paper. Yes I know that a 10 pt 5-0 might play against a 13 or 14 or even 15 pt 5-0 but I think that is better than the alternative at this point of either straight out manual pairing or going through and making sure that no one is paired twice or that no one is double paired, etc. Hopefully by the time next year rolls around we will have a program that can handle what we need/want to do but until that time I think we must go with the DCI reporter route for quickness of the in between round. I don't feel like taking 12-14 hrs to play 7 rounds of Swiss because of pairing issues.

On a seperate note how do we want "the program" to pair? Should the best 3-0 play the worst 3-0? Should the best play 2nd best? Should it be random? What happens if there is an odd number and someone has to play down? Should it be random who plays down? Should the best person play down? Just some food for thought (and probably wrong thread) because until we know how the rounds are "supposed" to be paired we will never be able to pair a tourney correctly.

_________________When I left you I was but the learner . . . now I am the master.

I'm pretty sure the idea behind Swiss Pairing had nothing to do with not playing another player twice. I think it primarily deals with pairing individuals of equal performance together and gives an alternative to single elimination or bracket type pairings. DCI just added another level to the pairings algorithm to prevent double pairings from happening, most likely to assuage High Level Magic players and bad matchups.

The double matchup is a rare occurence. In EVERY instance I've seen it has been a matter of being "paired down". I have never seen it pair two players who have played each other when they have an equal point total. (anyone correct me on this?) In other words, 2 3-1's with 8 points who have met before will not be paired up, but a 3-1 with 9 points and a 3-1 with 8 might. Or even a 3-1 with 6 and a 2-2 with 4,5, or 6 depending on who the highest is of that level.

So are we using Lobo's program or are we using the DCI reporter for pairings and using an alternate method to keep track of points?

Yes, we are using Lobo's program. This has already been decided. Aaron is working on adding the next level to the algorithm to help with avoiding rematches, but it's doubtful he will have it done in time.

urbanjedi wrote:

The whole idea behind a Swiss tourney is that no one plays another player twice during the Swiss portion.

That is pretty much completely untrue. The idea of swiss is to allow everyone to play muliple rounds of play (instead of single elimination) and to rank players 1-whatever based on how they do at the end of the day. The avoiding rematches is not a part of swiss at all. It's an additional level in the algorithm that is used by WotC - it probably had something to do with Magic, but it is not a part of all Swiss events. I've played in other games where this wasn't used.

urbanjedi wrote:

IMO we should use DCI reporter for auto-generated pairings and then keep track of 3/2 on a seperate sheet of paper. Yes I know that a 10 pt 5-0 might play against a 13 or 14 or even 15 pt 5-0

Nope, not going to. The rankings are determined by points, and we will be using points to pair. We've talked about it extensively (including the current thread) and we feel that it will work better this way.

urbanjedi wrote:

but I think that is better than the alternative at this point of either straight out manual pairing or going through and making sure that no one is paired twice or that no one is double paired, etc.

Ok, well I don't.

urbanjedi wrote:

Hopefully by the time next year rolls around we will have a program that can handle what we need/want to do but until that time I think we must go with the DCI reporter route for quickness of the in between round.

Well I hope so to. However that does not mean that using the DCI reporter is a better way to go. Considering the actual point of swiss (having 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 7-8 play each other every round, it's more important for accurate results to do it this way. Having a rematch is actually less significant than giving someone the easier schedule by using a system that isn't meant to measure what we are rating players on.

urbanjedi wrote:

I don't feel like taking 12-14 hrs to play 7 rounds of Swiss because of pairing issues.

Don't be dramatic, it will not take this long at all. The Champ will be no longer than it normally has been. We know what we are doing, and I can say with all sincerity that we will be at least as fast as Passtimes has been in the past.

urbanjedi wrote:

On a seperate note how do we want "the program" to pair? Should the best 3-0 play the worst 3-0? Should the best play 2nd best? Should it be random?

Best plays the best, that's how swiss works, and how it's meant to be. This should not be changed.

urbanjedi wrote:

What happens if there is an odd number and someone has to play down? Should it be random who plays down? Should the best person play down? Just some food for thought (and probably wrong thread) because until we know how the rounds are "supposed" to be paired we will never be able to pair a tourney correctly.

Lowest ranking plays down, that's how swiss works. And clearly you aren't that familiar with Lobo's program, but this is what it already does. 1v2, 3v4, 5v6 and so on. Obviously in the early rounds there isn't much differenciation. But as player records (points, OWP, OOWP) start to develop the rankings become more clear. That's how it's supposed to work, and that's actually what we have now.

The problem with Lobo's program at the moment is that it actually does this too well. The DCI reporter software actually avoids rematches by breaking the 1v2, 3v4 system when necessary. It's very complex to program it to do that. But what you end up with is something like 1v2, 3v5, 4v8, 6v7 in a lot of cases to avoid rematches. Lobo's is actually a more accurate swiss system in that you will always play the correctly ranked opponent - which in the end, actually gives a better result for each player at the end of the day in terms of accuracy of the rankings. So while it's not ideal, it is still better than the alternative. Using the DCI reporter and ranking by SoS will not give an accurate result without being very lucky. We will use Lobo's and do the best we can to avoid rematches, but honestly, it isn't the top concern in any way.

I was just trying to figure out how we wanted our Swiss to run. According to Wiki normal swiss the # guy plays the middle guy (at the same point level) and the # 2 guy plays the guy who is next after the guy #1 plays (so if there are 8 people then #1+#5 play, #2+#6 play etc). It however doesn't state who should play down when there are an odd number of people at the top point total. It also states that in chess if a double pair-up were to occur naturally the pairing is changed so that a double pair-up doesn't happen. It also states some various options of modified Swiss where double paor-ups are allowed and other stuff.

I was really more curious how we wanted our system to handle such things. If we want #1 to play #2 every round then I am fine with that. I don't know what DCI reporter uses as criteria (and don't have time to borrow a copy and run a bunch of programs to figure it out right now) and was curious how we wanted our system to work.

_________________When I left you I was but the learner . . . now I am the master.

The DCI software does 1v2, 3v4, 5v6, etc. unless that causes rematches. I have endeavored to make my Excel program do exactly that as well.

In fact, my program first tries to do 1v2, 3v4, 5v6, etc. and THEN checks to see if there are any rematches occuring. If it finds a rematch, it's programmed right now to go to that particular point in the matchups, and try to shift things from 5v6 and 7v8 to 5v7 and 6v8. I've even got a 3rd layer of 'skipping' programmed in, and honestly it works pretty well....most of the time. It's done some screwy things every now and then, but as I said earlier in the thread, it actually seems to work even better with larger groups.

That said....I WILL have a 7 round, up to 128 player, version of the SS ready to go before GenCon. I plan to finish that up this week. It will work exactly the same way as the spreadsheets used at the Regionals. In addition, I will make sure that Dean or whoever is running the tournaments has my cell number, so I can be reached to help with issues, regardless of where I'm at, though I should be around the gaming areas most days anyways. And yes, Dean, you will be able to run multiple tournaments at once, you'll just have to do a File > Save As for each tournament when you open the document....actually, come to think of it...I can probably program in something to do that automatically. Will look into that.

I have done some playing around with the programming algorithm to make a more robust version of the program, but it is quite frankly a beast of If/Then statements, and it hurts my brain just thinking about working on it. I'll continue to plug away at it, and try to figure out how to make it work, but I doubt that aspect of it will be ready before GenCon unless I have some burst of genius between now and then.

_________________-AaronMand'alor"You either die a hero, or you live to see yourself become the villain."

Good stuff aaron and yes I had already realized I could run several tounreys at once I just need to save the file as the name of the individual tourney.

I was going to post I needed the latest version of your program before Gencon but hey you are way too smart for that and have already posted that.

For everyone's info involved.

We will be attempting to use Aarons software for all events this year at Gencon. if for some reason we run into a bug in the pairing stages, I will then use DCI Reporter to pair and enter results into Aarons after manually pairing on his program.

Woot!!! Software ready! OK, so, it's just the Regionals version of it expanded to work for 7 rounds. So we're still likely to run into some semi-screwy pairings stuff here or there. But I'm going to try and work in some safegaurds for that over the next week, or at least things to specifically point out when/where pairing issues arise.

Also, I want to update my 'readme' file that goes along with it, to show how to use the thing.

It definitely works much smoother than it did before. I've also programmed in a step to automatically ask for you to save the file under a different name whenever you open it, so you should be prompted automatically to make sure you don't over-write the original file.

I still want to continue playing with the full algorithm, but that's not going to be finished before next week. At least at this point, we have something that works overall. I'll plan to email it to Dean and post it here on the forums by early next week at the latest. Hopefully by Friday.

_________________-AaronMand'alor"You either die a hero, or you live to see yourself become the villain."

Lobo can you email it to me then its ready. I dont know how much Ill be running the program but I would like to look it over a little just in case. I might just take tickets all weekend but I know there is the chance I might run the software.

3 points for a win in time2 points for a win after time has expired (based on tie breakers such as your score)0 points for a loss

However the judge can award a 3 point victory under some circumstances. For example if the opponent had been warned for slow play earlier and it was a significant cause for preventing the full win. Otherwise, yes, 145 is not the victory condition, that is a tie breaker win - so it's only 2 points. Play to win the game in the 1 hour time limit, or you have to accept that you will only get 2 points for it. It doesn't matter if the score is 145-10, or 54-38, you did not meet the victory condition so it's a 2 point win.

Play to win the game in the 1 hour time limit, or you have to accept that you will only get 2 points for it. It doesn't matter if the score is 145-10, or 54-38, you did not meet the victory condition so it's a 2 point win.

And like Bill said, it is the judge's discretion. If the score were 145-10 and all your opponent had left were commanders hiding in the back who never engaged, and you were engaging the entire game, you could garner a 3 point win if it were obvious your goal was to win the game in the hour time limit, but your opponent was not willing to let it happen.

_________________That's right, it's always the one in the middle you would least expect to be the most dangerous!

I was the judge, but yes, anytime you think you might deserve a 3 point win call us over.

When I ran Chicago I actually told people to leave their maps and figures in place and I verified. However, now that we have had 4 months with this system I will not be doing that in that Championships. Still, feel free to call myself or Bill over.

On Friday, Bill, Dean and I will have a seminar for those playing in the Champs...you will know what to expect and how will judge more fully.

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